2008 Log

31
December 2008 After a cold I usually suffer from a prolonged
and tiresome cough, which is only just beginning to lessen. So: not a
lot of glitteringly witty and festive postings in recent days. However,
I did play around with a new scanner to the extent of very nearly
completing the web archive of my first ever fanzine (co-edited with
Kevin Smith), Drilkjis. It
doesn't seem that long since our first issue in 1976.... 
Happy New Year! I don't know whether I dare make any resolutions.

25
December 2008 Only a obsessive loon would spare time to update
his website on Christmas morning just to repeat general good wishes to
all. Reader, I am that obsessive loon!  Jon's "unsuitable"
1970s Christmas card drawings -- see 18 December
below -- caused our mother to protest that he should draw a nice funny
robin instead. "Who does she think I am?" he expostulated on
the back of an old Mekons flyer, and added the following (never before
published!):

24
December 2008 The cold has ceased to be a bother, thank
goodness, and so have other tiresome afflictions (notably the infected
toe that started with a puny blister at Novacon and -- no, you don't
want to know, but I was having
Pobble
nightmares). Seasonal shopping and family visits completed at
last. Hazel and I wish you all a grossly indulgent Christmas, an
implausibly prosperous New Year, and -- if your preferences should lie
in that direction -- a heartfelt "Bah! Humbug!"

18
December 2008 I have a cold and am feeling a very long way
from dynamic. Here as a feeble gesture of festivity is a piece of
Christmas-card artwork drawn by brother Jon (the rock star, for it is
he) something like 30 years ago. 'Tis the season to be jolly:

7
December 2008 This time, after a false alarm in early
November,
Forrest
J Ackerman really has died -- on the night of 4 December. I'm glad
he made it to, and past, his 92nd birthday on 24 November. He'd been
calmly ready to go for weeks, but it's still sad to see the end of a
fannish legend. My email this weekend has contained more reports -- by
an order of magnitude -- than I received for the death of any other sf
notable this year, including Michael Crichton.

2
December 2008 The time is out of joint, O cursèd
spite.... Here's a rare public service announcement. Before going to
press with the December
Ansible, I checked
the 2009 Eastercon
website and (some days earlier) asked the committee if any price
rise was on the way. Ansible went out yesterday and today they
helpfully tell me that -- although as I write their website still says
nothing about this -- adult membership is rising to £55 and
supporting to £30 on Friday 5 December. Better get a move
on if you want to go and haven't yet joined. [Later: a stay of
execution! See 4 December entry.]

4
November 2008 Yesterday was another
Ansible
publication day. Following the mention of Paul Krugman, Nobel
laureate and sf fan, readers are reminding me of his 1978 paper on
The
Theory of Interstellar Trade: "This paper extends
interplanetary trade theory to an interstellar setting. It is chiefly
concerned with the following question: how should interest charges on
goods in transit be computed when the goods travel at close to the speed
of light? A solution is derived from economic theory, and two useless
but true theorems are proved."  Remember
Rover
in The Prisoner?

1
November 2008 Just when I thought I'd finished adding photos
to the
Welsh
signage album, hordes of friends are sending links to
this fine
specimen which I wish I dared steal from the BBC. Later:here's
another one, via Fran Dowd.  Things I ought to be doing:
finishing Ansible 256, reading and reviewing
Robert
Rankin's latest novel for SFX,
helping Hazel pickle her vast crop of radish pods, and making heaps of
notes for the Terrifying New Project Whose Contract Has Yet To Be
Signed. But, frankly, I feel lazy today. Instead, here's a castle
visible (admittedly in the distance) from our North Wales retreat:

27
October 2008 The old, old story: we were away from home and
email, returning to find a ton of post and 1,700+ messages in the inbox.
Then came deadline panic with the SFX column and a great deal of
agonizing about whether to accept the commission for a proposed
nonfiction tome which will bring in some welcome cash but has a
terrifyingly tight schedule. You may hear more of this. 
Meanwhile, here's a slightly eccentric selection of
holiday
photos showing signage in North Wales!

15
October 2008 Things are crowding in on me right now; expect no
further postings here for a week or so.

3
October 2008 Another month, another
Ansible.
Please imagine a tremendously witty posting here: I haven't time to
write it because I'm off to a mini-convention in Kettering. Homework en
route: reading Greg Egan's latest novel
Incandescence,
review to appear in a
New
Scientist special planned for mid-November.

24
September 2008 I've been posting occasional links to photos
uploaded to Facebook -- as on 21 September, below -- and have now put a
backdated list of these links on the Photographs
page. This, as usual, was done because I should be doing something else.

13
September 2008 A useful product in the Viking stationery
catalogue: "niceday HAZARD WARNING TAPE". I
imagine this as carrying a bold black-and-yellow design of smiley faces,
to be stuck across the doors of shops where there's a hazard of being
told with hideous insincerity to have a nice day. (Please don't anyone
spoil this by revealing that "niceday" is just a brand name.)

5
September 2008 The glass is half full: my latest short story "Gigatech"
is in this week's issue of Nature rather than the slightly more
obscure sister magazine Nature Physics! But there's a half-empty
side to things too: once again I have no new fiction forthcoming, which
means the titanic effort of actually ...  Thanks to Dave Lally and
others who sent a scenic postcard from Parcon (the Czech/Slovak national
convention) in Plzen or Pilsen -- with fervent if slightly wobbly
endorsements of the very great wonderfulness of Pilsner Urquell beer,
clearly the essential primum mobile of this event.

23
August 2008 An exchange with Diana Wynne Jones about the
Notoagebanding
campaign. Diana: "My agent kept trying to call this
site Notoa Gebanding and couldn't decide whether it was German or
Japanese." Me: "I think Notoa Gebanding must be a
magical realist working in Botswana." Diana: "Of
COURSE he/she is!" So now you know.

19
August 2008 The traditional newspaper distrust for new-fangled
electronic media goes back further than I thought. Once upon a time,
complimentary theatre tickets would come with a covering note like this:
"Dear Sir, The Management of the ------ Theatre will be much
obliged if you will very kindly co-operate with them in safeguarding the
enclosed invitation from being used for the purpose of broadcasting a
notice of the play from any station of the British Broadcasting
Corporation. The invitation is intended to meet the convenience of
legitimate journalism, exclusive of broadcasting." Dated 10 October
1929 and quoted in Ego: The Autobiography of James Agate (1935)
-- where Agate added, "The quarrel is dead and buried, largely
owing to a letter to The Times signed by a dozen of the
best-known theatre-managers who gallantly came forward to uphold
wireless dramatic criticism, and to The Times's leading article
on the subject." But in 1929, there was a fearful social gulf
between "legitimate journalism" and anything involving
electrons.

12
August 2008 One Worldcon programme item was to be a
demonstration of the forgotten art of mimeographing a fanzine, and they
asked me (among others) for a one-page PDF contribution.
Here it is.

6
August 2008 Well, here I am not attending the
World SF Convention. The
official Langford party line is that I can't afford it, but costs --
while terrifying -- aren't the whole story. Alas, the only part of any
convention that I still enjoy is one-to-one socializing, since it's too
much of a strain (thanks to my lousy hearing) to follow programme items.
Even informal conversation gets difficult when a comfortable group of,
say, two to six people expands to a dozen or more. Throw in the
extraordinary feeling of dread that overcame me in the run-up to my last
appearance at a Hugo ceremony, and the staunch efforts of the War On
Tourism to remove any trace of enjoyability from flying, and ... well,
I'm really very happy to let Martin Hoare represent me in the year when
I probably lose a Hugo to John Scalzi. Still I hope
everyone
who makes it to Denver enjoys desperate fun, even John Scalzi. 
No To Age Banding: Diana
Wynne Jones pushed this campaign in a response to
Ansible 253
(to appear in the September issue), and incidentally persuaded me to
sign up. 
Roger
Ebert: "Fanzines beget blogs" (via Moshe Feder) 
Boy
Scout Atomic Energy Merit Badge (via Bruce Townley) -- I don't
think this was on offer when I was a Scout in old South Wales long, long
ago. [Later: this proved
inspirational.]

19
July 2008 Another bottle of vintage champagne in the post! I
must have won the Independent
crossword again. Still haven't drunk last month's bottle. What can we
celebrate?

17
July 2008 I'm trying to sign up with
AnthologyBuilder
and make selected Langford stories available for custom anthologization.
This is by popular demand, to the extent that a few of the
Milford UK workshop crowd
want to assemble anthologies of Milford stories -- so I've submitted my
very first, "Serpent Eggs", as workshopped in 1977 (bloody
hell!), rewritten and sold in 1994, and since reprinted a few times. 
Verity Stob's
Doctor
Who and the moody Dane. 
Thog's
Romance Masterclass (via Janice Gelb): "... nor torture so my
flesh with the stirring beauty of rosebuds and cream mounds ..."

12
July 2008 One of today's chores was bringing the
Books Received list up to date, in
pathetic hope of tiny Amazon affiliate fees. (Here the doorbell rings.
Oh no, not another review book just when I'd finished? No, even worse:
it's the Jehovah's Witnesses.) One mild surprise:
Dan
Dare, Pilot of the Future: Voyage to Venus -- Part 1 as an
audio CD adaptation. What, no actual Frank Hampson artwork? But I
suppose it's hardly more perverse than all those live-action films based
on comic strips. One moment of paranoia: Stephen Donaldson's
Fatal
Revenant, a hardback I was sure I'd received and even
reviewed a year ago. Aha,
not a senior moment after all: the accompanying publicity sheet is about
(but contains no ISBN for)
the
new trade paperback. Lastly, a further illustration of the
infinite expansibility of J.R.R. Tolkien, whose
On
Fairy-stories is familiar as an essay that once needed to be
packaged with the story "Leaf by Niggle" to make even a slim
volume (Tree and Leaf). No room for "Leaf by Niggle"
here! After the editorial introduction by Verilyn Flieger and Douglas A.
Anderson, pages 27-84 are occupied by the essay itself, with paragraphs
severely numbered in preparation for what is to come. An "Editors'
Commentary" (pp85-121) is followed by "The History of 'On
Fairy-Stories'" (pp122-158) under such subheadings as "The
Evidence", "The Background", "The Lecture", "Essays
Presented to Charles Williams" and a mass of variorum material ("Bodleian
Library Tolkien MS. 16 Fol. 28" etc) where, even skimming, I began
to lose the will to live. Next come a couple of contemporary newspaper
reports on Tolkien's lecture, after which transcriptions of the draft "Manuscript
A" and "Manuscript B" -- with further editorial
commentary -- take us up to page 299. The final tale of 320pp is
completed by bibliographies and an index. It's all terribly worthy and
numbing. As C.S. Lewis wrote: "If we have to choose, it is always
better to read Tolkien again than to read a new criticism of him."
All right, he actually said Chaucer, but ...

9
July 2008 Once again I've been away from home and net access
for a while. I'll deal with the waiting masses of mail and email when
time permits. Sad to come back to so many messages about
Tom
Disch -- and deaths in fandom, too.

1
July 2008 Remember that third edition of the Encyclopedia
of SF? It's still very much a work in progress, but towards the end
of June we passed the two-million-word mark. That is, more than 700,000
words have been added since the second edition of 1993. Back then,
according to the final electronic text, there were 6,571 entries. Now
there are 8,537. Onward! 
Ansible 252
(July 2008) appeared yesterday, possibly the first time that an issue
has been published before its nominal month. Millions of outraged emails
from protesting readers have, so far, not been received. 
How
to Recognize a Weapon of Mass Destruction and
How to
Tell the Birds from the Flowers.

27
June 2008 Oh, poot. Being fond of eccentric indexes --
especially if missed by the British Library's jolly bedside book Indexers
and Indexesin
Fact & Fiction ed. Hazel K. Bell -- I'd meant to quote the
following in Cloud Chamber 158.
The book is Mark Twain's Autobiography as prepared and indexed
by Albert Bigelow Paine: "The most interesting feature is the
index, which begins with 'About a meeting in Carnegie Hall' and
continues through such items as 'Comment on a newspaper clipping',
'Delight of Clemens's secretary in forceful language' and 'Invitation
from Augustin Daly' (a more pedestrian indexer might have put this under
D). I imagine a maiden aunt of Mr. Paine's constructing it as a labor of
love; she was a small-town librarian, myopic and gently insistent on
doing things her own way, and I like to think she derived much quiet
pleasure from putting 'Little girl's letter about Huckleberry Finn'
under 'L'." (Dwight Macdonald, Against the American Grain,
1962)

21
June 2008 The usual tip of the hat to that fine man Gordon Van
Gelder for rushing me advance copies of the August Magazine of
Fantasy and Science Fiction with my latest "Curiosities"
piece, discussing Prof A M Low's 1937 epic Adrift in the
Stratosphere. Still talking about me: the collected Langford columns
for Amstrad PCW magazines, which I'd intended to self-publish as a
companion to The Apricot Files,
look as though they'll be appearing as a nicely packaged Cosmos/Wildside
trade paperback. The working title is The Limbo Files, and cover
design maestro Juha Lindroos is already
on the case. It's true that I got away as often as possible from the
ostensible subject matter to bang on about writing, freelancing, and the
unspeakable horror of the literary life, making this material much more
general-interest than the Apricot columns. 
US
Republican humour.  This
A
E van Vogt plot summary makes me profoundly glad never to have
read the novel.

17
June 2008 Obituaries for Algis Budrys continue to appear: here
are the
Chicago
Tribune,
Locus
and SFWA,
while SF Signal
has links to several personal tributes.
John
Clute in the Independent forgets (in fact never knew about
-- I asked him) Budrys's second trip to England as a guest of the 1989
Mexicon in Nottingham, and
Tom Disch
cannot be doing with de mortuis tact. My only personal meeting
with Algis Budrys was during the above-mentioned Mexicon, a cheerful
encounter at a time when the
Conspiracy '87
controversy was largely forgotten. I greatly admired his writing
-- stories, novels, criticism -- and still do.

6
June 2008 A bottle of champagne in the post is always welcome,
but I'm not sure that I earned it. On most Saturdays I pit my feeble
brain against the tricky Inquisitor crossword in the Independent,
and on 31 May I found (actually, Hazel found) one David Langford heading
the list of winners for #72. This had to be a mistake, since I
distinctly remember not being able to finish that one. Maybe they
accidentally printed the winners for #71 or #73, both of which I
completed and sent in; anyway, the champers turned up this morning.
Whoopee!  I particularly liked #71, titled "At Random"
as a hint of the "publishing houses" theme. All the unclued
entries came from book titles containing houses: Bleak, Cards, Usher,
Spirits, Pooh Corner, etc. Much more my sort of thing than the ones that
require you to know names of cricketers, lyricists or US locomotive
classes.  Pam Scoville continues to send encouraging daily
bulletins on Paul's progress -- with luck he'll be out of hospital
today.

3
June 2008 I was worrying considerably about
Paul Barnett, but
Pam Scoville broadcast this encouraging post-op bulletin: "Paul was
out of surgery by 2pm this afternoon. He had just a triple bypass since
the vascular surgeon did not think the carotid was anywhere near needing
to be cleaned out. They will watch it closely in the future. By my
second visit (only allowed 30 mins every 2 hours) his color was starting
to come back and by 6pm his coloring was almost normal, his vitals had
stabilized and the airway came out. Although his throat is sore from the
airway and he hasn't had tea in over 24 hours he was able to let loose
with a verbal zinger or two -- even though he sounded like a frog. So,
so far, so good." Fingers remain crossed while he's still in
intensive care.

1
June 2008 Once again,
Ansible has
happened. My thanks to the select few who sent encouraging responses
(plus a muffled grumble for others whose addresses are regularly set to
tell the world that "XXX is out of the office", a point
curiously lacking in interest for the owner of a mailing list).
Triumphal noises about the fact that I didn't stop at the roundish
number 250 may of course be premature -- there's an even rounder number
(in the notation now
used for all arithmetical operations) coming up this year, with
Ansible 256.

31
May 2008 Of late I've been noticing quantities of suspicious
white powder on our dining-room carpet; the local street price turns out
to be £1.50 per kilogram. Hazel (for it is she) has been sprinkling
salt about the place in hope of deterring the slug that regularly gets
in through some undetected crack and leaves a complex trail across the
floor -- the revolutionary blazon of the Shining Path. Now at last: "It's
gone," Hazel quavered in horror. "It immolated itself on the
salt by the Welsh dresser. It looked awful but at least we've
got rid of it...." Me: "You realize it probably has a large
family under the floor that'll be wondering what happened to Daddy and
sending up search parties?" She: "SHUT UP JUST SHUT UP AND
DON'T SAY ANY MORE!" Langford, Man of Tact. I won't even mention
the difficulties of hoovering up salt that's been closely involved in a
hideous slime immolation.

12
May 2008 The time is out of joint ... all sorts of things have
been failing to synchronize, like the arrival from Florida of Hazel's
brother and his lady a day later than expected ("when we said we
were coming on Wednesday we meant we were starting on Wednesday"),
my mother's discovery when she went into hospital for an eye operation
that she wasn't booked until the next day, and so on (and on). General
jitters and confusion. At least that nice Gordon Van Gelder has bought
my latest "Curiosities"
piece for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and life
was also brightened by the anthologist who asked if I could submit to
his new project since he'd greatly liked
"Enemy Mine".
Langford and Longyear -- they sound so much alike.  Today, with
the deadline looming, I delivered my 172nd SFX
magazine column. Mr Langford, where do you get your crazy ideas
every four weeks or so? I wish I knew.

30
April 2008 Thanks to a lingering cold (this one will run and
run!) I've been feeling wretched for some while. At least recovery has
been achieved in time for the Arthur C. Clarke Award ceremony tonight. 
One of the things I've been putting off while under the weather is
deciding what to do about the Insidious Temptation of John Scalzi, who
invites the other 2008 fan writer Hugo nominees to make fools of
themselves display their skills at "Whatever,
my blog, [which] gets between 30,000 and 40,000 unique visitors
daily". A nice gesture which gave me a terrific attack of the
dithers. Blimey, Ansible and I don't get that many visitors
in a month.... This goaded me to compile
a page of links to my 2007 fan writing
(obviously excluding paid work like the SFX
columns, but with one substantial article not previously on-line)
and to stare at it gloomily.

18
April 2008 More silence here. Yesterday I woke up with a foul
cold and couldn't stir myself to any effort beyond fiddling with an
oldish computer that needed things installed. (The epic saga of
searching for missing video drivers is omitted by popular request.) By
eerie coincidence, just as the snivels were at their worst and there
wasn't a dry hanky in the house, a bottle of single malt arrived in the
mail -- brother Jon's delayed birthday present. Enormous restraint was
exercised, so today I have only the continuing cold and not a hangover
as well. Bleah.

12
April 2008 Yesterday was the Brasenose College Gaudy. No
filthy anonymous graffiti were slipped into my gown, no doubt because
the dress code was Black Tie and No Gowns. Martin Hoare and I went along
together in a mutual-support pact which the college tried its best to
undermine with copious free drinks. By special request of hardly any
readers of this page,
here
are some pictures.

10
April 2008 Another birthday! Besides the cards and greetings,
extra cheer in the mail comes from the new issue of Nature Physics
with my short-short story "The Cold Truth" -- carefully
balanced, thanks to some arcane law of conservation, by HMRC tax forms
and a credit card bill. I miss the bizarre birthday messages I used to
swap with John M. Ford, born on the same day (though younger), but
there's still synchronicity with famous Welsh artist Jim Burns (who's
older, ha ha). Now Hazel and I are off for for a fortifying lunch at
Sweeney
& Todd's pub and pie-shop in Castle Street, Reading. Yes,
there's a barber next door.

6
April 2008 I tend to get vague about how many people visit the
Ansible site, since
research in this area conflicts with major lifestyle choices like apathy
and sloth. Today, though, I took a look:
Ansible 248
(March 2008), which is no longer the latest visible issue and should
have settled down a bit, has reportedly had something over 3,900
visitors. The email list membership, as usual, is running at slightly
above 3,500. Adding these figures may not be a sensible exercise -- for
all I know, most email recipients follow the web link to see the pretty
version -- but feel free to work out the total and marvel at its
insignificance compared to the daily visitor count at any popular blog.
Ansible: the elitist newsletter!

25
March 2008Orbital
(Eastercon 2008) is over and a fine time was had by all. I took a
tiny computer so I could show people the current state of play on the
Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (third edition), tinker with a
review in progress, and write the tribute to Arthur C. Clarke which SFX
wanted by noon today -- now delivered and approved, which is a relief.
Thanks to hero chauffeurs Martin Hoare and Keith Freeman for getting me
to Heathrow and back again without any need to face the horrors of Bank
Holiday public transport.  Here are the
BSFA
Awards. Apparently we're returning to the same venue, the Radisson
Edwardian at Heathrow Airport, for Eastercon
2010. This year I was in the overflow hotel, the Renaissance, not
having realized until I saw the place that it was a rebranding of the
old Heathrow Hotel where I and others ran Skycon over the Easter weekend
of (dot dot dot ominous and doom-laden pause) 1978. Some dim
Langfordian recollections of
this appear in the instant fanzine Journey
Planet produced by James Bacon and Chris Garcia during Orbital
-- although they somehow managed to lose all my italics.

19
March 2008 Goodbye,
Arthur C. Clarke.
I don't have an obituary waiting on file, but who inside or outside the
science fiction world needs to be told about Sir Arthur? He was one of
the last surviving stars of what John Clute has called First SF. "Overhead,
without any fuss ..." When honoured by Thog in
Ansible 178
a few years ago, he sent delighted email: "Now I can die happy --
finally made it to MASTERCLASS!" It's time for my umpteenth
rereading of (no hesitation about this choice) his seminal
sense-of-wonder novel The City and the Stars.

18
March 2008 Since
all
the best pundits say you absolutely must have permalinks on your
web page, I've installed a home-made system here. (The Plain People
of the Web: Why not just use blog software that does it all for you?
Myself: Sheer perversity.) The entry dates are now supposed to
be permalinks that take you to the relevant entry, whether it's still on
the front page or has been deported to the archives. Maybe the
front-page handling is a bit too flashy. Maybe, for some of you, it
won't work at all. Let me know.

17
March 2008 Suddenly, Eastercon
2008 seems awfully close: I'm supposed to be there from Friday to
Sunday. At least I've just had some convention pocket money from
ALCS,
which -- reflecting my unhealthy focus on book and magazine nonfiction
rather than proper sf stories -- paid me some 15 times what I got from
library loans via this year's
Public
Lending Right handout.  The fan initiative to equal
Terry Pratchett's
$1m donation to Alzheimer's research now has its own website:
Match It For Pratchett,
with a handy PayPal donation option.

14
March 2008 Would you believe yet another computer disaster?
Not an important one, but quite challenging in a fantastically tedious
way. The great Arthur D.
Hlavaty's fanzines used to issue the dread "neep-neep warning"
when computer geekery impended: I think that at this point I should say
neep-neep and hide the horrors
behind a link.

8
March 2008 Panic in the morning when Hazel's computer monitor
failed. Swift rescue thanks to our
friendly local shop, which is getting a lot of business from the
Langford household this year. Then, with arms aching from carrying heavy
CRT units to and fro, it was time to fling together
this month's issue of
Ansible....

7
March 2008 For many years I've avoided Oxford college
reunions, largely because I'm too mean (Hazel: "Thrifty, dear, you
mean thrifty") to buy or hire a dinner jacket for the occasion.
However, this year I've been seduced by curiosity and the discovery of
an outfit approximately my size in a Reading charity shop. Will anybody
who reads this be attending the Brasenose
Gaudy on 11 April? No, I didn't think so. And I suspect BNC events are
rather less exciting than described in Dorothy Sayers's Gaudy Night.

5
March 2008 Slight diversion: PDF proof of my story "The
Cold Truth", another short-short sf contribution to "Futures"
in Nature or (this time) Nature Physics. No idea when
this will appear.

28
February 2008 A long, long drive with Martin Hoare to Ken
Slater's humanist funeral far out in the lonely fenlands (actually on
the outskirts of King's Lynn). Martin's new GPS kit, running on a
Windows Vista laptop and never before used in anger, provided an
interesting challenge for his passenger -- especially when, with 20
miles to go, the battery ran down. Besides Ken's daughter Susie and
other family members, the turnout included Brian Ameringen, Erik Arthur,
Simon Bradshaw, Claire Brialey, Jim Campbell, David Eggleton (who used
to keep the market bookstall with Ken long ago, and helped organize a
1960s Peterborough Eastercon), Martin Hoare, Tim Illingworth and Marcia,
me, Rog Peyton, Mark Plummer, Chris Priest, Doreen Rogers, Peter Weston
(carrying the latest issue of his fanzine Prolapse for Susie),
and Bridget Wilkinson. It's hard to believe that Ken is gone.

23
February 2008 Picocon at Imperial College in London. I always
enjoy the walk from Paddington across Hyde Park, with a pause to giggle
at the
Albert
Memorial. Had a few drinks, bought books from
Brian Ameringen, talked
crosswords with Roger Robinson, chatted with various other greying fans,
and that was it. I'm getting shockingly lazy about attending programme
items (especially when held several streets away from the main venue)
that I probably won't be able to hear.

21
February 2008 Recently I drafted some brief reminiscences of
growing up in South Wales, for a coming project of brother Jon's. Urban
legends about Welshmen, wellies and sheep were fleetingly touched upon,
and now I find there's a old legal tradition of linking the Welsh to
certain activities. The long title of one 16th-century bill goes: "An
Acte for the contynuyng of the Statutes for Beggars and Vacabundes; and
ayenst conveyaunce of Horses and Mares out of this realme; ayenst
Wellsshemen making affraies in the Countyes of Hereford Gloucestre and
Salop; and ayenst the vice of Buggery." (18 Hen. 8, c. 6, 1536.)
Luckily for all concerned this was repealed in 1863.

15
February 2008 On the 11th, at Orion's typically lavish
champagne party in the Royal Opera House, I saw a few of the usual
author suspects (Chris Priest, Rob Holdstock, Robert Rankin, Adam
Roberts) and met a couple of new ones (Joe Abercrombie, Alex Bell) but
have nothing edifying to report.  At an SF Encyclopedia
meeting with John Clute, Darren Nash of Orbit dropped heavy hints about
drollery in their packaging of Charlie Stross's
Halting
State. Aha: the little pixel-people on the jacket are mostly
story characters, but this extra one from the back cover would appear to
be the author himself....

2
February 2008 A slight change of pace as I put aside mere
computers to sign a pile of sheets for PS Publishing -- not my own book,
alas, but a novella by John Grant (Paul Barnett) to which I was allowed
to write the introduction. The author suffered the hard slog of having
to sign all 726 sheets (plus extras) to cover the entire hardback print
run of The City In These Pages; the introducer merely has to
deal with the 200 numbered- and 26 lettered-edition copies. So the
introducer is rarer and more special than the mere author, and rarer
still is the illustrator whose sought-after scrawl will appear only on
the fantastically expensive lettered run of 26. I know my place.

31
January 2008 At last there's a working computer on my
favourite desk with the comfy chair, and I can stop perching at the
awkwardly placed backup machine. Lots and lots of software still to be
reinstalled, though, and one or two bits of hardware for which no modern
drivers are to be had. Bear with me.  A small surprise: the dear
old Necronomicon, which
celebrates its thirtieth anniversary this year, has come out in a smart
new Japanese hardback translation.

23
January 2008 Another tiresome and gloom-ridden week. The
regular SFX column was unusually difficult to write, for some
reason. Computers still in disarray -- today I found time to get back to
the shop, where the replacement had allegedly been fixed, but at home it
fails in precisely the same way: although simple stuff works, there are
consistent browser errors, browser crashes, or even sudden reboots
whenever I go to a script-heavy website like Gmail.com. My guess is
something memory-related on the motherboard. The nice people at the shop
are now offering to exchange the machine. We shall see. 
Meanwhile,
a
moment of culinary cheer....

16
January 2008 Good news: on Monday I acquired a new computer to
fill the gap (as it were) in the house network. Bad news: it's developed
a problem and is back at our local shop, being tinkered with by experts.
However, I've now steeled myself to instal an assortment of utility
software on another machine so I can at least update a few web pages.
The usual email address is also active
once more.  It was hard to focus on the computer worries since I
also had to deliver an sf review by noon today, a task which owing to my
unusual conscientiousness entails reading the book. This was The
Margarets by Sheri S. Tepper: a good read to which Gollancz had
added the cruel new twist of invisible page numbers. Presumably they
were light grey in the US edition and failed to reproduce well. Imagine
the fun of taking notes when close study of adjacent pages is needed to
work out what each Rorschach cluster of pale dots is supposed to
represent....  Good news again: that nice Henry Gee of Nature
has smiled upon my one fiction submission of 2007, which will appear in
Nature Physics.  Almost too good to be true: although many
printed variants have been reported over the years, is this
the first such
announcement on line?

13
January 2008 Unlucky thirteen. The motherboard of my usual
working computer went up in smoke this morning -- very nearly literally:
the office reeks of something that got far too hot. Of course there are
plenty of backups, and the hard drive (currently linked to another
system) seems to have survived intact. But, for a day or three, I
probably won't be picking up email from my usual address. Please CC any
urgent or important messages to d e a f m a n at Gmail.com. Normal
service will be.

9
January 2008 It's been a sluggish month so far.
Ansible 246
failed to astonish the world on 7 January, and I caught up with some
correspondence. That's about the sum total of Langfordian achievement
since New Year's. Must try harder. Must stop being distracted by the
lure of cryptic crosswords: "Harry Potter and a genie have early
discussions (12)."

January
2008 (nominally) -- it's really time that I cleared the "Random
Links" section from my home page.
The items are mostly years old, and I've dropped out of the habit of
adding new ones because the most topical sf links now go into the
right-hand column of the Ansible
links page while non-sf ones tend to appear in home-page diary
entries. So let's shove the old list out of the way here ...